# Why Some People Always Get Promoted (And Others Never Do)

Promotions reward performance, but also potential ratings, career track, manager judgment and timing. The evidence shows where merit often stops.

Date25 Jul 2026Category[Career Development](https://jobicy.com/blog/category/career-development.md)
[Pay and Benefits](https://jobicy.com/blog/category/money-legal.md)AuthorJoshua WardReading time≈15 minutes

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![Why Some People Always Get Promoted (And Others Never Do)](https://jobicy.com/data/server-nyc0409/galaxy/mercury/2026/07/f443fa7b904c-221.webp)
In 2026, the Burning Glass Institute and New York University examined 1.3 million U.S. career histories and identified a group of workers who had remained employed but received no meaningful promotion or real wage increase for at least five years. They represented 24.2% of the mid-career professionals studied.

That finding establishes the practical issue behind the title. Career stagnation is not confined to employees with poor attendance, disciplinary records, or obsolete skills. It also affects experienced people who continue doing the work their employers hired them to do.

The common explanation is that strong performers rise and weak performers stall. Performance matters. The available evidence does not support the stronger claim that promotions simply identify the best workers.

A promotion requires at least three decisions. Someone must judge the employee ready. The organization must have a position or career level available. A manager or committee must prefer that employee over the alternatives. Each decision introduces information gaps, incentives, and discretion.

This explains why promotion can become repetitive. Workers who advance early gain better titles, broader assignments, higher-level contacts, and stronger claims to the next role. Workers who miss the first moves often receive fewer opportunities to produce the evidence required for later ones.

The result can resemble a meritocracy from a distance. The personnel records tell a less orderly story.

## Promotion Is an Allocation Decision, Not a Performance Prize

Companies often describe promotion as recognition. Their own organizational charts show that it is also allocation.

A business may have 20 strong analysts and one open management position. It may need a technical expert but have no approved level above “senior.” A department may freeze promotions while another expands. A manager may retain a productive employee in the current role because replacing that person would be expensive.

None of those conditions proves that the overlooked worker lacks merit. They show that promotion depends on the employer’s demand for a different kind of labor.

This distinction matters because employees usually control performance more directly than they control organizational demand. They can improve a process, hit a sales target, or complete a project. They cannot create an approved headcount slot, compel an executive to fund a new level, or prevent a restructuring from removing the next position.

The organization also decides what counts as upward movement.

Some firms maintain separate tracks for managers and individual contributors. In principle, this allows specialists to advance without taking responsibility for staff. In practice, the tracks do not always carry equal rewards.

A 2026 working paper, [Dual Career Ladders: Individual Contributors in Modern Corporate Hierarchies](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6663478), used personnel records from dozens of medium-sized and large North American companies to reconstruct reporting structures and career levels. The researchers found that individual contributors appeared throughout corporate hierarchies but earned less than managers at comparable positions. The penalty increased at higher levels.

The researchers also reported that women and minority employees were disproportionately represented on individual-contributor tracks, particularly at higher ranks. Pay differences within each track were not the main issue. Track assignment was.

This is a working paper, not a peer-reviewed final publication. Its results should remain provisional. It nevertheless identifies a mechanism that ordinary promotion advice tends to ignore: an employee may progress inside a track that the company has already decided to value less.

A worker can perform well and still be standing on the slower escalator.

## Performance Opens the File. “Potential” Can Decide the Case

Employers need to estimate whether an employee can handle a larger role. Current performance alone cannot answer that question. The job after promotion may require different skills, greater scope, or responsibility for other people.

That is the strongest case for assessing potential. A reliable engineer will not necessarily manage engineers well. A salesperson who closes large accounts may fail to coach a team. Promoting solely on current output can reward one skill by assigning the worker a different job.

The problem lies in how employers estimate future ability.

In February 2026, the American Economic Review published [“Potential” and the Gender Promotion Gap](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257%2Faer.20220831), based on data covering 29,809 management-track employees at a large retail chain. The researchers compared performance ratings, potential ratings, promotions, and later outcomes.

Women received higher performance ratings on average. Managers nevertheless assigned them lower potential ratings. Those ratings did not accurately predict future performance: women subsequently outperformed male colleagues, including among employees near the promotion threshold.

The authors estimated that differences in potential ratings accounted for about half of the observed gender promotion gap.

>

“Women receive substantially lower potential ratings despite receiving higher performance ratings.” — Alan Benson, Danielle Li, and Kelly Shue, American Economic Review

The paper identified two mechanisms.

The first was stereotyping. Managers appeared to apply different expectations when assessing future leadership capacity.

The second was strategic retention. Managers could have an incentive to keep strong employees in roles where those employees produced value. A promotion may benefit the worker while imposing a replacement and training cost on the current unit.

This creates a conflict that corporate language rarely states plainly. The manager who recommends a promotion may lose one of the team’s strongest contributors. The manager who delays it may protect short-term output.

The employer owns the promotion process. The employee carries much of the career risk.

The study concerns one large retail organization. It does not establish that every employer uses potential ratings in the same way or that the gender gap has the same size across sectors. It does establish that subjective forecasts can diverge from measured performance and that the divergence can affect pay and promotion.

“Potential” is therefore not merely performance viewed forward. It is a separate judgment made by people with their own expectations and incentives.

![Why Some People Always Get Promoted (And Others Never Do)](https://jobicy.com/data/server-nyc0409/galaxy/mercury/2026/07/ee0bc2f332c5-221.webp)
Strong performance can qualify an employee for promotion—or make a manager reluctant to move them.

## The Manager Changes the Promotion Environment

Employees often receive advice to manage their careers as if the organization were a fixed system. It is not. A change in manager can alter which work receives attention, which employees receive stretch assignments, and which names enter promotion discussions.

A 2026 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, [Managers and the Cultural Transmission of Gender Norms](https://www.nber.org/papers/w34782), examined personnel records from a multinational company operating in more than 100 countries. The authors used international manager rotations to study whether managers brought different gender attitudes into local offices.

The researchers estimated those attitudes using managers’ countries of origin, birth cohorts, and responses recorded in the World Values Survey. They then compared pay and promotion outcomes before, during, and after the rotations.

Male managers from countries with gender attitudes one standard deviation more progressive than the local norm reduced the team-level gender pay gap by about five percentage points, an 18% decline from the baseline gap. The change came from increased pay for women rather than decreased pay for men. Higher promotion rates for women accounted for much of the difference.

The effect persisted after the international manager left. Local managers exposed to the newcomer also began producing smaller gender gaps in their own teams.

The study used a quasi-experimental design, but it was still conducted inside one multinational company. The measure of a manager’s attitudes came from country and cohort averages, not from a psychological assessment of each manager. The authors also found some broader office-level relationships that they correctly described as correlational.

Those limits do not erase the central result. Teams exposed to different managers produced different promotion and pay outcomes under the same multinational employer.

A promotion system can have one policy manual and many local realities.

The finding also weakens a convenient employer defense: that unequal promotion rates merely reflect differences in employee ambition or performance. In this case, changing the manager changed the outcomes.

## Formal Equality Does Not Remove Availability Penalties

Employers may apply identical promotion criteria on paper while rewarding a narrower model of availability in practice.

A 2026 peer-reviewed study in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility examined [employers’ promotion preferences in Germany](https://cris.maastrichtuniversity.nl/en/publications/gender-differences-in-employers-promotion-preferences-the-role-of/). Caroline Wehner, Paula Protsch, and Andries de Grip used a factorial survey experiment across organizations.

In a factorial survey, researchers vary characteristics in hypothetical employee profiles and ask decision-makers to evaluate them. This allows the researchers to isolate the effect of working time, gender, care responsibilities, and other factors while holding the remaining information constant.

The employers did not display a direct preference for male candidates simply because they were male. They did penalize part-time work and care obligations. Because women more often carried those conditions, the formally gender-neutral preferences produced unequal career consequences.

The researchers also found that work-family policies did not eliminate the promotion disadvantage associated with care obligations.

This study measured employer preferences in an experiment, not completed promotions in payroll records. Respondents may also answer hypothetical questions differently from the way they act when a real budget, vacancy, and employee relationship are involved.

Even with that limitation, the mechanism is clear. An organization can offer flexible work while continuing to treat the use of flexibility as evidence against advancement.

The policy exists. The penalty survives.

The same principle may apply beyond care responsibilities. Workers who cannot accept last-minute travel, attend evening events, relocate, or remain continuously visible may satisfy the written requirements of a role while failing the organization’s unwritten test of availability.

Companies rarely publish that test. Employees usually discover it after a decision has been made.

## Early Promotions Produce Evidence for Later Promotions

The phrase “some people always get promoted” suggests a stable personal quality. The large career-history data point instead toward cumulative advantage.

The [2026 NYU–Burning Glass report on mid-career mobility](https://www.sps.nyu.edu/about/news-and-ideas/articles/press-releases/2026/1-in-4-mid-career-professionals-stranded-in-career-stall-new-nyu-sps-burning-glass-institute-report.html) found that career stalls often developed gradually. At the ten-year point, workers who later stalled had already averaged fewer promotions and less wage growth than their peers.

The stalled group averaged 1.5 promotions and 45% wage growth over that period. Workers who avoided a stall averaged 1.9 promotions and 66% wage growth.

The difference in promotions may appear small. Its consequences are not limited to four-tenths of a title change.

A promotion can alter the employee’s next set of options. It may provide budget authority, managerial experience, ownership of larger projects, contact with senior decision-makers, or eligibility for positions at other companies. Those opportunities then become qualifications for the next promotion.

The report estimated that a software developer experiencing a mid-career stall could accumulate a wage deficit of more than $43,000 over 15 years compared with similarly positioned peers who continued advancing.

>

“Career stall is one of the least visible forms of economic insecurity.” — Matt Sigelman, Burning Glass Institute

Stall rates also varied by sector. The report identified rates of 33.4% in public administration, 30.2% in real estate, and 26.6% in finance. Those differences indicate that career structure and occupational mobility matter. The same employee behavior can produce different outcomes in different labor markets.

The report linked some internal transitions with lower stall risk. Computer programmers who moved into data science roles within the same company showed a reduction in stall risk of up to 86%.

That is an association, not proof that moving every programmer into data science would reproduce the result. Workers who make such transitions may differ in skill, employer support, location, or motivation. The report relied on observed career histories, which can also omit unreported internal changes and may estimate compensation where direct payroll data are unavailable.

Still, the scale of the data makes one conclusion difficult to dismiss: stagnation is not a rare personal failure. It is a recurring labor-market outcome, and it often becomes visible before the five-year threshold used to define it.

## The Evidence Does Not Support Pure Cynicism

The studies above could be assembled into a simple claim: performance does not matter; politics decides everything.

The evidence does not support that conclusion.

The retail study did not show that employers ignored performance. It showed that potential ratings added a subjective layer that disadvantaged women even when their performance was stronger. The German experiment found penalties for part-time work and care obligations, but it did not find a direct preference for men once those characteristics were separated. The multinational-manager paper showed that managers affected outcomes, not that every manager promoted arbitrarily.

The dual-career-ladder research found structural pay differences between tracks. It did not show that employees were randomly assigned to them. Some workers prefer individual-contributor roles, and some lack either the interest or ability required for management.

Promotion decisions must contain judgment because future performance cannot be directly observed. A company promoting a manager must estimate whether the candidate can make decisions, allocate work, handle conflict, and remain accountable for other people’s results. No spreadsheet can remove that uncertainty.

The question is whether the employer disciplines the judgment with evidence.

A company can define promotion criteria, compare ratings across managers, examine whether “potential” predicts later results, publish career tracks, and audit promotion rates by demographic group, work schedule, location, and manager. Or it can place several executives in a room, ask who “feels ready,” and call the outcome a talent process.

My judgment is that the second method remains common because ambiguity protects managerial discretion. It also protects the organization from having to explain why two employees with similar records received different decisions.

That is an interpretation. The cited studies establish specific failures in specific settings, not the prevalence of undocumented promotion meetings across the economy.

## Visibility Matters, but Its Effect Is Hard to Measure Cleanly

Career advice often tells employees to become more visible. The advice is plausible. Promotion committees cannot evaluate work they do not know occurred.

The difficulty is separating visibility from opportunity.

Workers assigned to strategic projects naturally become more visible. They interact with executives, present results, and acquire sponsors. Their promotion may follow from strong performance, from exposure, from the importance of the project, or from all three.

The reverse also holds. Employees performing essential but routine work can become difficult to replace and easy to overlook. Their reliability keeps operations running while producing little new evidence of readiness for a larger role. The employer benefits from stability. The employee may not.

The 2026 research reviewed here does not provide a clean universal estimate for the effect of self-promotion, office attendance, executive contact, or sponsorship on actual promotion rates. Studies often rely on surveys, single companies, particular occupations, or self-reported outcomes. Strong causal evidence remains limited.

It would therefore be inaccurate to claim that visibility is worth a specific promotion premium.

What can be established is narrower. Managers influence promotion outcomes. Subjective potential ratings matter independently of performance. Track assignment affects pay and advancement. Early movement predicts later momentum. Employees with care obligations or part-time schedules can face penalties even under formally neutral criteria.

Visibility may help workers navigate those mechanisms. It does not replace them.

## A Promotion Request Should Test the System

An employee deciding what to do after being passed over needs more than encouragement to work harder.

The useful information is procedural.

Who approved the decision? Which level or role was available? What published criterion did the selected employee meet that the rejected employee did not? Did the company evaluate current performance, future potential, business need, or manager sponsorship? When will the next decision occur? What evidence would change the result?

A manager who answers with specific gaps creates a testable plan. A manager who offers only “keep doing what you’re doing” supplies no promotion path.

The employee should also distinguish three different outcomes that companies sometimes group under “career growth”:

More difficult work
* A higher title
* Higher compensation

They may arrive together. They often do not.

Additional responsibility without authority, title, or pay can create evidence for a future promotion. It can also provide the company with higher-level labor at the current rate. The difference becomes apparent only when the employer states what decision will follow and when.

Workers on individual-contributor tracks need the same clarity. If the company claims that technical and managerial careers are equal, it should be able to show comparable levels, compensation ranges, promotion frequency, and access to senior positions. A diagram with two upward arrows is not evidence of parity.

For someone already several years into a stall, the relevant comparison may no longer be internal. External employers can value the same experience differently because they have different vacancies, track structures, managers, and immediate needs. Changing employers carries costs and uncertainty. Remaining inside an indefinite process does too.

## “Always” Is Usually Compounding Advantage

The central claim can now be answered with conditions.

Some people do receive repeated promotions because they continue to perform well in roles that the organization needs to fill. The evidence also shows that performance is not sufficient and that promotion systems do not operate uniformly.

Repeated advancement becomes more likely when an employee enters the favored career track, receives strong potential ratings, works for a manager willing to advocate, can meet the organization’s availability expectations, and gains early opportunities that produce qualifications for later roles.

Repeated stagnation can emerge from the opposite sequence. One missed move reduces access to the next assignment. A manager rates the employee as reliable but not “high potential.” Part-time work or care obligations narrow the field. The company has no equivalent senior track. Years pass while performance remains acceptable.

The promotion history then appears to validate the original judgment. The employee who was promoted has leadership experience because the company gave that person a leadership role. The employee who was not promoted lacks it because the company did not.

That does not make every promotion unfair. It means promotion records contain both evidence of ability and evidence of prior access.

The strongest 2026 findings support a qualified answer: people are not promoted repeatedly by merit alone, and those who stall are not necessarily failing at their jobs. Promotion depends on performance, but also on managerial judgment, organizational structure, available roles, work arrangements, and decisions made earlier in the career.

Nearly one quarter of the mid-career professionals studied by NYU and Burning Glass remained employed while going at least five years without meaningful advancement or real wage growth.

You might also like: [Single-Page Resume Tips for Global Remote Jobs](https://jobicy.com/blog/148768-single-page-resume-tips-for-global-remote-jobs.md)

[![Author](https://jobicy.com/data/server-nyc0409/galaxy/mercury/2026/07/avatar_3519_1784991700.jpg) By Joshua WardStartup Recruiter · Talent Advisor · UKHey, I’m Josh — a recruiter-turned-writer based in London. I’ve helped build early teams at over 25 startups in the past 7 years, mostly in SaaS and fintech. Now I share insights about how small companies hire, what hiring managers really look for, and how to stand out in a noisy job market.](https://jobicy.com/blog/author/joshuaward.md)

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